


cry havoc and kick up your heels

by Akumeoi, ninemoons42



Series: dance for your heart [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dance, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ballet, First Dance, First Meetings, Inspired by Music, M/M, boys being incapable of expressing themselves with words, emotional tension, so they express themselves with dance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 18:02:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12710097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akumeoi/pseuds/Akumeoi, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Noctis Lucis Caelum dances for his life and for his heart and the world loves him for it.But when a cherished dream hits a serious roadblock, he's left at a loss, and he thinks he's got nothing left to express through the music, through the dance.He decides to take a breather, and to re-learn how to dance for himself.And he meets someone who has that exact same goal in mind -- someone named Prompto Argentum.





	cry havoc and kick up your heels

**Author's Note:**

> The roots of this thing come from a sort of song swap on Tumblr.
> 
> (ninemoons42) Also I keep doing dance AUs in all of my fandoms and it didn't take me THAT long to do this one, it seems.
> 
> Credits: [Lisa Macuja in La Bayadere](http://images.gmanews.tv/v3/webpics/v3/2013/11/2013_11_01_17_15_09.jpg) // [Cross My Heart by DAY-BREAK](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa-gy0kcrHM)

Spring, coil, flex, and he literally hears the words in Ignis’s voice and he can’t be mad, can’t fault the other man, because the words really do help, but -- maybe not when he suddenly switches back from the kind of thinking that lives in his bones and nerves and pure skin-knowledge, to the kind of thinking that lives mostly in his mind, and that not always attached to the rest of him: he’s coming down, he’s falling fast, the high evaporates, and he hits the floor on flexed feet and bent knees and his arms windmilling a little for balance, and -- he growls, and says, “Stop playback,” and the music in the room cuts off on the voice command.

Fuck’s sakes, Noctis Lucis Caelum thinks, and very carefully keeps his gaze locked on his turned-out feet. It’s just a delay. It’s just a small setback, all things considered. It’s a damned accident, and nothing more. The world will keep, and he’ll keep going. It’s bad fucking luck. Ravus Nox Fleuret will make a full recovery in two months, and there’s a real guarantee he’ll be able to dance again. Things will get back on track.

But in the here and now, everything that’s happened has conspired against him, and now Noctis can’t dance and now Noctis can’t concentrate, either -- not even long enough to hang on to the same damned warmup routine he’s been following for the past year.

Beneath his feet the wooden planking creaks gently, softly, almost reassuringly. Dark-gray knots and burls in fine-planed honey-colored wood, the grain still mostly free of the little cracks and craters left behind by too many practicing feet, too many hard landings.

He sits, hard, and curls up into a small tight knot of misery and muscle, and in the process he catches sight of himself in the three mirrored walls bisected by the gleaming black barres, and he sees a small boy, a miserable boy, hunched over and trying not to cry, reflected and reflected again. Infinity of images, his own childhood instead of who and what he is now, every other step like distilled agony as he learned to get back on his feet, and this is bad, if he’s flashing back to that part of his life when he’s here in a safe space.

Maybe Luna is right, after all: maybe he ought to give dancing a rest, even if it’s just for a few days.

He certainly isn’t going to do himself any favors, if he winds up injuring himself through careless practice, and then he’ll go down as Ravus did and for the same damned dumb reasons, and he might as well forget about doing the show completely, and that will be six years of groundwork and heartbreak and joy and pain and truths with teeth in them, all gone, all gone forever, worse for having missed its moment.

He sobs, once, and tells himself he’s okay.

Thump, from somewhere nearby.

Thump. Thump. Again and again and again.

The sound catches at him, pins him on its staccato, and he’s grateful to lean into it, to figure out what it is, and the synapses in his mind fire and fire again, filtering, and -- definitely a human body, he thinks, someone is definitely moving around and making those sounds. The echoes sound good, too, resilient for the most part, except when there’s a harder or a softer sound and, and. 

It sounds like being out of practice, and Noctis hides his smile in his knees and his crossed arms, his smile and his sympathy, because: whoever is making those sounds is expressing exactly how he feels right now, and he’s grateful.

Grateful enough that he realizes he’s being rude, using someone else’s dancing practice to examine his own feelings and sort them out of their tangles and their prickles and their thorns, and that person entirely unknowing, therefore being used.

Noctis has been used too many times in his life -- short as that life is and has been -- and he’s not going to use this person. He’s not going to start. 

He’s going to get up and thank them, now.

And he glances at himself in the mirror, and there’s nothing to be done for the sweat and the spikes in his hair, the remnants of an outbreak of zits below his right ear, the gnarled knots in his hands, the ruin of his feet with the callouses and the too-visible veins.

Anyway the bedroom slippers can hide those ruined feet, with their fuzzy fur lining and houndstooth check; and the rest he can try to conceal in some way with his dark green fleece blanket, or maybe the blanket is a distraction from all those other things. Aside from his dancing shoes and his media player, it’s the thing he carries around with him wherever in the world he goes. Damned drafty dance studios anyway. 

Out the door of his practice room, and he closes one eye, follows the thumps as they peter off and --

There’s the only open door, halfway down the corridor. No one is mad enough to come to this place on the outskirts of the city at some ungodly hour just past sunrise, and he’s only here himself because he’d gotten out of his bed and the clutch of the nightmares and he’d refused to go back to sleep, and he has keys to this place and he knows the owner, because that owner is named Ignis Scientia.

He’s actually half-expecting Ignis himself to be at the barre. Wouldn’t put it past him.

But he steps into the open doorway and -- that’s not Ignis, not even by any stretch of the imagination.

For one thing, it’s been years since Ignis hung up his pointe shoes.

For another, Ignis never wears his glasses when he practices.

The room’s soloist, its occupant, is dressed in such a strange clash of everything that Noctis almost forgets to breathe, cataloging.

Splash of red-green-black-yellow in the unbuttoned plaid shirt over the mismatched whites of the singlet and the leggings and the leg warmers, the cream of the pointe shoes -- but the thing that catches Noctis’s attention is the clean line of the man’s body, as he breathes and balances and lifts himself, all his weight tipped carefully into the line of one leg and then he carefully rises on to the toes of that foot, so he would actually be addressing the door and the people watching near it, if he were looking up.

Noctis watches him straighten his knees and shoulders, and flick out the hand he’s holding over his head, so the fingers fan out into a sort of winged shape. His other hand he holds out behind him, just at the level of his own eyes, and he flicks that, too, fingers splayed out.

Steady, steady, one foot on the ground, and the one in the air moves, hair’s-breadths, up and up and the man bends a little at the hip to accommodate that rise, to stay gracefully balanced, till that leg in the air is straight out and the top of his foot is turned completely in Noctis’s direction.

Every line in the man’s body is drawn together in the suggestion of a leap held at bay.

Every line in the man’s face is drawn together in a frown of powerful concentration.

Irrationally Noctis thinks of the petite maestra he’d only met once, five years ago: and at fortysomething then, she had only been toying with the very idea of going into retirement. At fortysomething then, she was still more than capable of wringing joyful tears from her adoring audiences. And Nikiya had been one of her signature roles, one she’d recently and tearfully had to leave behind, and the man in the practice room has almost got the right tilt to his head to be playing that tragic role, if only it hadn’t been for the clench in his jaw line, and the heavy frames of his eyeglasses.

But as if the man had been reading his thoughts: the man wobbles, and his nose scrunches up, and he suddenly sneezes -- the sound echoes in the practice room, and the man groans, shakes his head, just as he falls easily out of his pose. “Fucking,” the man begins, with a soft snort.

And his eyes come up.

Noctis is treated to a bright blue-eyed stare that the glasses can’t hope at all to contain, and a red flush appearing all at once in freckled cheeks and -- shoulders, of all the things.

But those eyes sweep up and down and he’s not ashamed of his blanket or his slippers and -- the man relaxes, feet coming together in fifth position.

Then he does smile, and that smile turns into a laugh, and Noctis can’t even make himself pretend to feel insulted. 

“Nice outfit,” the man says, hearty and sweet and not unkind at all.

“Same to you,” Noctis says, and allows himself a grin. “That’s some plaid you’re wearing there. Really brings out the color of your eyes.”

“It keeps me warm. I’m cold all the time.” That flush surges again. “You been watching long? Don’t tell me, let me guess. You’re gonna tell me something’s wrong with, I dunno, my knees or my shoulders.”

How expressive that smile is, and how strange, because that same warm smile is going stiff -- and his shoulders are coming up, moving up, and Noctis holds his hands up, palms facing out. “Critique is not what I came here for. Who wants to do that at fuck o’clock in the morning? I came here because I wanted to -- thank you.”

Blink. Blink.

Those blue eyes are very distracting, he thinks, with the emotions he can almost see clearly.

“What’d I do? Okay, I know the answer to that one, I was too busy fucking up Nikiya -- ”

“I never said anything about fucking anything up. You were practicing,” Noctis says, honestly. “And I was -- fucking everything up my own self. I had to tap out for a bit. And when I did I could hear you, practicing. You sounded like you knew what you were doing.”

The man laughs again.

But this time it’s a broken small laugh.

“Oh, man, are you a little too late to be telling me that. How can I sound like I know what I’m doing? I haven’t danced in five years. I don’t know what I’m doing. I didn’t even know why I wanted to try and do Nikiya. Stupid whims, you know. I get those a lot. And they never turn out brilliantly. I should have learned my lesson by now, and clearly I haven’t.”

“With your form like that?” With difficulty Noctis swallows his surprise.

Shrug, that only looks careless.

And the way the blond turns away, the corner of his lip coming crooked and sad.

Noctis clenches his hand into a fist.

And says, “I’ll be right back.”

Runs back to his practice room and picks up his music player and hustles, and he throws the little device at the blond -- he picks the heavy square and its trailing wires out of the air, easily, and tilts his head. “And?”

“Play,” Noctis says: voice command.

Swish and flurry of cymbals and synths, and a driving rhythm of electric guitars, and the music is enough to fill up this half of the practice room.

Maybe enough for the two of them.

Noctis steps into the room, fully, and tilts his head as the melody develops and the vocalist begins to sing: “Come on, just -- move. Move, and stop thinking, and stop _over_ thinking. I’m here with you, promise, and not to make fun or anything.

“Just -- dance with me.”

He begins with the sweep of his leg and his hand, the whirl of his body as he spins and tries to catch the drift of the song -- he only knows what it means because he looked up a translation of the lyrics -- and when he thinks he’s found the right place, the right position to be, he takes a breath, and -- he’s leaping and twirling into the first verse, even-keeled but there are such currents beneath the words, and -- he lets his body rule his mind, and his thoughts are working only to remember the form that he wants, the right way to fall into the song and its swirl -- 

On the last line of the refrain the blond places the music player on the floor -- and pushes into his space, catches up his hands, and into the bridge -- they’re dancing, together, and one moment Noctis leads, the next he’s easily yielding, the two of them leaping and breaking together, freestyling without any form of second-guessing, arms and legs crossing intimately, and he breaks away to fly out into a series of jetés and the blond leaps beautifully after him --

When the refrain rolls around again he takes his hand and whirls him around, guides him through an improvised pas de deux, and -- the moment is broken when he fumbles the last step and the blond just purses his lips, and springs away into one more pirouette before coming to a stop.

And Noctis is grinning, and feels the stretch of that grin all the way down into his toes. The warmth of the man’s hands, the flyaway lines of his hair. “That form,” Noctis says. “That’s what I was talking about. You’re good, and more than that, you’re talented.”

“And I know who you are, and what you mean when you talk about form,” is the frowning response. “You’re not bullshitting me, are you? You’re, fuck, you’re Noctis Caelum. What the fuck are you doing here? What the fuck am I doing, dancing with you?”

Noctis blinks, suddenly, and comes to a startling realization:

He’d seen a glimpse of the blond’s smile -- but he’d lost it, as though it had fallen off the face of the earth, when the music started up.

That’s -- that’s wrong, he thinks. 

So he fumbles for his words. “What the fuck am I doing here -- and what the fuck are _you_ doing here? We were dancing. And if you know who I am, if you know what I do, then maybe you should remember: I don’t bullshit, not for anyone or anything. I have literally no reason to,” he says, as open as he can make himself be. “And I don’t know who you are, so I don’t have any reason to be an asshole, either.”

“I’m no one,” is the response, mouth still drawn into a defensive line. “Just -- someone from out there. Prompto Argentum’s the name.”

“Well you need to dance, Prompto,” Noctis says. “Seems you can’t not. Five years is nothing. You’ve got something in you that you need to let out and this is the only place you can do it.”

To his relief, Prompto’s face opens out, relaxes, into something more lifelike. Something almost real. Freckles stippling the corners of his mouth. “You probably know that one just as well as I do.”

Noctis nods, once.

Wills him to believe it.

**Author's Note:**

> Some changes have been made from the original version, which was posted [here](https://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/post/167417124041/this-was-supposed-to-be-a-snippet-voxiferous).
> 
> ninemoons42 on Tumblr: [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)


End file.
